Rumors And
Ruminations, Internet Telephony, October 2000. ("According
to my top-secret Redmond source, the company is embarking on a wholesale
change in its vision statement to a communications centric point of view
-- in part driven by its recent "Dot Net" initiative. Microsoft is
considering SIP-enabling the next version of NetMeeting, ...")

As for softswitches, they are "being used for doing old proprietary
stuff," Eriksson said. "H.323 is the last dinosaur of the telcos, and
it's going to go away." Telia is expanding its intra-company trial of
SIP communications from the Swedish carrier's 27,000 employees to its
660,000 ISP customers. Working with Ubiquity Software, Telia will offer
a specially targeted SIP offering for teens.

We found that Version 2 of the ITU-T's H.323 standard is the most widely
supported voice-over-IP standard today, with 88% of the products
supporting it (see Figure 4). However, H.323 does not appear to be the
long-term direction of the IP-PBX vendor community. Only 13% of the
products currently claim support for H.323 Version 3. ... [T]he big
trend is clearly toward Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), which was
published as an Internet draft document last year. While only 13% of
the products we surveyed support SIP now, more than two-thirds of the
vendors said they will implement SIP over the next year.